What is best practice for fixing urls that have duplicate content, non-static and other issues?
-
Hi,
I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:-
(a) they are mostly too long
(b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice)
(c) they don't use Static URLS
An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe
I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have?
thanks,
Ben
-
you could introduce breadcrumbs. It will make the URL nicer in the search results of google without changing the URL!
-
Thanks Dirk, that is good to know. The pages do rank very well, so I think I'll ignore my previous thoughts regarding how the URLs should look/behave and leave them as they are for now.
Many thanks!
-
For the url's - my advice would be: if it ain't broken - don't fix it. While static url's may be the best situation - Google is quite capable to analyse the parameters in the url.
You could fix the url's & put 301 from the old to the new - but if the products rank well on the current url I wouldn't touch them. Check also this old post on webmaster central : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html
While the main topic is unrelated to your question - this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html also gives you insight on how Google deals with parameters in the url.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Woocommerce URL Structure Issue
Hi everyone ! To put you in context, I am doing an audit on an E-Commerce site selling auto parts with WooCommerce. I have some concerns regarding the url structure and here's why: Product category page url: /auto/drivetrain/cv-axle-shaft-assembly/
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg
Product page url included in the product category page: /product/acura-integra-cv-axle-shaft-90-01-honda-civic/ The way I see my situation is that the product page is considered by Google as an intern link and not as a page included in in the subfolder of the category page. 1. Am I right?
2. If yes, is there a solution to fix the issue with woocommerce to improve the category page ranking ? Thanks y'all !0 -
Hreflang and possible duplicate content SEO issue
| 0 <a class="vote-down-off" title="This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful">down vote</a> favorite | Hey community, my first question here 🙂 Imagine there is a page with video, it has hreflang tags setup, to lead let's say German visitors to /de/ folder... So, on that German version of page, everything like menus, navigation and such are in German, but the video is the same, the title of the video (H1 tag) is the same, <title></code></strong> and <strong><code>meta description</code></strong> is the same as on the original English page. It means that general (English) page and German version of it has the same key content in English.</p> <p>To me it seems to be a SEO duplicate content issue. As I know, Google doesn't think that content is duplicate, if it is properly translated to other language.</p> <p>Does my explained case mean that the content will be detected by Google as duplicate?</p> </div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Technical SEO | | poiseo0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
I have a ton of "duplicated content", "duplicated titles" in my website, solutions?
hi and thanks in advance, I have a Jomsocial site with 1000 users it is highly customized and as a result of the customization we did some of the pages have 5 or more different types of URLS pointing to the same page. Google has indexed 16.000 links already and the cowling report show a lot of duplicated content. this links are important for some of the functionality and are dynamically created and will continue growing, my developers offered my to create rules in robots file so a big part of this links don't get indexed but Google webmaster tools post says the following: "Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools." here is an example of the links: | | http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/salocharly/profile http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/preferences/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/privacy/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/edit-details/salocharly http://anxietysocialnet.com/profile/change-profile-picture/salocharly | | so the question is, is this really that bad?? what are my options? it is really a good solution to set rules in robots so big chunks of the site don't get indexed? is there any other way i can resolve this? Thanks again! Salo
Technical SEO | | Salocharly0 -
I'm getting a Duplicate Content error in my Pro Dashboard for 2 versions of my Homepage. What is the best way to handle this issue?
Hi SEOMoz,I am trying to fix the final issues in my site crawl. One that confuses me is this canonical homepage URL fix. It says I have duplicate content on the following pages:http://www.accupos.com/http://www.accupos.com/index.phpWhat would be the best way to fix this problem? (...the first URL has a higher page authority by 10 points and 100+ more inbound links).Respectfully Yours,Derek M.
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Wordpress URL weirdness - why is google registering non-pretty URLS?
I've noticed in my stats that google is indexing some non-pretty URLs from my wordpress-based blog.
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron
For instance, this URL is appearing google search: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/index.php?p=439 It should be: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/2009/01/do-american-boarding-schools-face-growing-international-competition.html Last week I added the plugin Redirection in order to consolidate categories & tags. Any chance that this has something to do with it? Recs on how to solve this? Fyi - I've been using pretty URLS with wordpress from the very beginning and this is the first time that I've seen this issue. Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Duplicate content
I have just ran a report in seomoz on my domain and has noticed that there are duplicate content issues, the issues are: www.domainname/directory-name/ www.domainname/directory-name/index.php All my internal links and external links point to the first domain, as i prefer this style as it looks clear & concise, however doing this has created duplicate content as within the site itself i have an index.php page inside this /directory-name/ to show the page. Could anyone give me some advice on what i should do please? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate content?
I have a question regarding a warning that I got on one of my websites, it says Duplicate content. I'm canonical url:s and is also using blocking Google out from pages that you are warning me about. The pages are not indexed by Google, why do I get the warnings? Thanks for great seotools! 3M5AY.png
Technical SEO | | bnbjbbkb0